This past March, as the reality of the Coronavirus began to make itself felt in the United States, I sent out an email entitled “Art in an Uncertain Time” in place of my normal blog. Galleries were being shut down, and dealers were working remotely. I quoted Eric Baumgartner of Hirschl & Adler Gallery who had written me from his home office, “We are trying to stay productive and busy, but I must say that I am hesitant to reach out to people about something so trivial and unnecessary as fine art right now when everyone is in full-on survival mode.”
Nobody knew what would happen to the art market. Nobody ever does, really, but things seemed much more apocalyptic in March – was this the beginning of the end?
Yet the dire scenarios did not come to pass. Some galleries failed, but many have survived. People still wanted art. Like the rest of the retail economy, art dealers dealt with the challenge by upping their games. Websites were made more sophisticated, more online outreach to collectors was begun, and galleries were open on an appointment-only basis to a few socially-distanced clients at a time. Art fairs in new virtual formats became more specialized in the galleries they presented and more targeted to specific demographics.
In my conversations with fellow dealers over the past few months, I have found no one excited, but everyone admits to doing some business. With their operating expenses slashed to the minimum, dealers are surviving. The virtual art fairs are enabling enough sales to justify the outlay. Collectors can still fall in love with a painting, even if presented online. While the pandemic has brought enormous hardship to workers in certain sectors of the economy, minimum-wage workers were never clients for expensive artwork in the past, so there was no change there.
It has become habitual, for me as for others, to bemoan the weak state of the market for 19th-20th century American art in recent years, but that’s not entirely true. The market has bottomed out, and there are buyers for top-quality examples of their genres, particularly if the works are fresh to the market and are conservatively estimated at auction. The Hudson River School, for example, has been seen as weak, but this month a superb small seascape by John Frederick Kensett, estimated at $250,000-350,000, sold for $665,200. A nice Jasper Cropsey, estimated at $15,000-25,000, sold for $93,750.
Among American Modernists, a New York City scene by Jan Matulka, estimated at $70,000-100,000, sold this month for $201,600. (See my blog on Matulka from a couple of years ago.) A small Jackson Pollock sold for $13 million a couple of months ago. There’s still money out there.
And speaking of money, a wonderful carousel scene by Joseph Christian Leyendecker, the artist whose Saturday Evening Post cover is shown above, set an auction record for the artist this month at $516,1000 at Sotheby’s. Illustration art is hotter than ever. Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth have been the only such American artists to crack the million-dollar barrier at auction so far, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Leyendecker join their company before too long.
In the meantime, we continue to wear our masks, wash our hands, and hope that we can get a dose of the vaccine soon. Goodbye, 2020, and good riddance! May 2021 be a better year for us all. Stay safe, everyone.
